Trades — Thursday 2nd May 2019

Since the Easter break I’ve posted a few big winners, so I thought it was time to post a couple of bread and butter trades again, the sort we can expect to find every day. Because let’s face it, two grand profit from one five minute trade is, while not unheard of, not something we can hope to see every day either. It’s the bog-standard simple wins — the easy middles — that account for the bulk of a day trader’s profits.

First up then, here’s SFM.

It doesn’t get a lot more textbook than this. A standard setup for a momentum trade on a modestly priced stock that’s accessible to anyone with a margin account. A pretty uneventful price drop after the entry, then an exit at a logical place after it a) failed to hit an obvious target and b) momentum evaporated at the same time. $600 profit on this puts it at the upper end of the ‘bread and butter’ type trades, but it’s well within expectations for a regular trade.

Here’s another, which occurred a few minutes later, on UAA.

This trade was over much more quickly, taking less than ten minutes to produce $400. The exit was less clearly defined on the chart alone, but of course the chart never tells the whole story. For that we need the tape, and the tape made it clear that things had taken a turn and that it was time to get out. The chart hints at what happened with that whopping great green volume bar.

There you have it, two regular trades, neither of which was unusual, both of which were well within the realms of what we can expect on any trading day. Between them they netted a thousand dollars in profit (before commissions, which are negligible). They were far from the only trades like this, they’re were plenty more to be had…just like there are every day.